7 Wall., 76). Not only, therefore, can there be no loss of separate and independent autonomy to the States through their Union under the Constitution, but it may be not unreasonably said that the preservation of the States and the maintenance of their governments are as much within the design and care of the Constitution as the preservation of the Union and the maintenance of the National Government. The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union composed of indestructible States. When, therefore, Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. . . . The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. . . . The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration, or revocation, except through revolution, or through the consent of the States.

Considered, therefore, as transactions under the Constitution, the ordinance of secession, adopted by the convention and ratified by a majority of the citizens of Texas, and all the acts of her legislature intended to give effect to that ordinance, were absolutely null. They were utterly without operation in law. The obligations of the State, as a member of the Union, and of every citizen of the State, as a citizen of the United States, remained perfect and unimpaired. It certainly follows that the State did not cease to be a State, nor her citizens to be citizens of the Union."

Having thus determined that the State of Texas was, and always had been, a State in the Union, since the time of her admission thereinto in 1845, the Court next addressed itself to the question whether at the time the suit was brought it was, notwithstanding its "unreconstructed" condition, in a position to claim the privileges secured to States by the federal Constitution, and among them, in particular to the right to bring an original suit in the Supreme Court of the United States. As to this the Court said: "In order to the exercise, by a State, of the right to sue in this Court, there needs to be a state government, competent to represent the State in its relations with the National Government, so far at least as the institution and prosecution of a suit is concerned. And it is by no means a logical conclusion, from the premises which we have endeavored to establish, that the governmental relations of Texas to the Union remained unaltered.. . . No one has been bold enough to contend that, while Texas was controlled by a government hostile to the United States, and, in affiliation with a hostile confederation, waging war upon the United States, Senators chosen by her legislature, or Representatives elected by her citizens, were entitled to seats in Congress; or that any suit, instituted in her name, could be entertained in this Court. All admit that, during this condition of civil war, the rights of the State as a member, and of her people as citizens of the Union, were suspended. . . . These new relations imposed new duties upon the United States. The first was that of suppressing the rebellion. The next was that of reëstablishing the broken

The au

relations of the States with the Union. thority for the performance of the first had been found in the power to suppress insurrection and carry on war; for the performance of the second, authority was derived from the obligation of the United States to guarantee to every State in the Union a republican form of government. . . . When the war closed there was no government in the State except that which had been organized for the purpose of waging war against the United States. That government immediately disappeared. . . . There being, then, no government in Texas in constitutional relations with the Union, it became the duty of the United States to provide for the restoration of such a government. . . . Whether the action then taken was, in all respects, warranted by the Constitution, it is not now necessary to determine." The acts of the President, the Court then went on to say, were done in pursuance of his powers as Commander-in-chief of the army, and were but provisional and were so regarded by Congress. As regards the acts of Congress the Court said that nothing in the case required it to pronounce judgment upon the constitutionality of any particular provision of them, the fact that it appeared that the government that brought the suit had been recognized by Congress as the actually existing government of the State, being sufficient to give it jurisdiction.1

1 Justice Grier rendered a dissenting opinion in which he maintained that whatever may have been the theory, Texas had, as a fact, been outside of the Union, and had been so decided to be by Congress. "It is a question of fact, I repeat, and of fact only," he declared. "Politically, Texas is not a State in this

In Knox v. Lee (12 Wall., 557) the Court said, speaking through the mouth of Justice Bradley: "The doctrine so long contended for, that the federal Union was a mere compact of States, and that the States, if they chose, might annul and disregard the acts of the national legislature, or might secede from the Union at their pleasure, and that the General Government had no power to coerce them into submission to the Constitution, should be regarded as definitely and forever overthrown. This has finally been effected by the national power, as it had often been before by overwhelming argument. . . . The United States is not only a government, but it is a National Government, and the only government in this country that has the character of nationality."

In Keith v. Clark (97 U. S., 454), decided in 1878, the Supreme Court again emphatically asserted the legal conclusion that the seceding States had never been out of the Union. Referring to Tennessee, the Court declared: "This political body has not only been all this time a State and the same State, but it has always been one of the United States,-a State of the Union. Under the Constitution by virtue of which Tennessee was born into the family of States, she had no lawful power to depart from that Union. She never escaped the obligations of that Constitution, though for a while she may have evaded their enforcement."

Before either of the cases of Texas v. White, and

Union. Whether rightfully out of it or not is a question not before the Court." With Justice Grier Justices Swayne and Miller concurred.

Keith v. Clark was decided, an attempt was made to have the reconstruction acts held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, by asking for an injunction restraining the President from enforcing them. The federal court, however, decided that it could not grant a restraining order against the Chief Executive under the circumstances, the matters involved being political and not judicial in character (Mississippi v. Johnson, 4 Wall., 475).